The Cuyahoga County Progressive Caucus emails:

Tomorrow, Monday, 18 July, a group of us will be joining End Poverty Now, NEOCH, LMM, United Workers and many other groups, to march across the east side of Cleveland. JOIN US!!! The purpose is to show solidarity in the fight against poverty. This is a properly permitted event, and will be conducted in a lawful manner. There will be a rally before the march featuring music by Rebel Diaz and other major national performers and speakers.

Westsiders: We will be meeting at our westside office—11910 Detroit Ave. Lakewood—tomorrow, Monday, 18 July, at noon.

Eastsiders: We can meet at the event rally/staging grounds—E. 45th and Superior, near LMM— tomorrow, Monday, 18 July, at 1 p.m.

For more information on the rally and march visit End Poverty Now.

Then, on Wednesday, 20 July, join us for Cuyahoga County Progressive Caucus’s first official event, a screening of the film Pay 2 Play.

If you are not yet a member of CCPC, it’s free to join!! Visit our website for more information or call Steve Holecko at 440.220.1874.

Thank you all!

Tristan Rader
Cuyahoga County Progressive Caucus

There are lots and lots of NSFW takes on the Trump-Pence 2016 logo and Samantha Bee’s team came really, really close, but over at Free Thought Blogs, commenter Lassi Hippeläinen nailed the real, hidden meaning behind infamous logo which may have surpassed the 2012 London Olympics logo fiasco.

Mano Singham had earlier predicted that Sarah Palin, because she wasn’t on the speakers’ list for the convention, might be the surprise VP candidate. Given Lassi’s comment, perhaps Mano was right all along.

This is almost more fun than you’re allowed to have with your pants on.

When I checked my stats for yesterday I noticed a sudden interest in a post from 13 February: NINA TURNER A VICE PRESIDENTIAL CONTENDER…? In that post I wrote:

So, yesterday I got into a fairly heated debate with a co-worker about Hilary Clinton vs. Bernie Sanders. At one point I said that there were plenty of women I would happily vote for as our next president. (In 2014 I voted for two women running for President/Vice President: Jill Stein and Cheri Honkala). Clinton just wasn’t on my list.

My list, off the top of my head, included Maria Cantwell, Christine Gregoire, Patti Murry, Jill Stein, Elizabeth Warren and Nina Turner. Turner has never been to Washington, but she is a political force. I met her briefly at a Cleveland State event a few years back and I’ve always been impressed with her. Because my attention is too often drawn to the national and international scenes (I depend upon Roldo to keep me grounded locally), I totally missed Turner’s support of Bernie Sanders. My bad.

I did some checking this morning and found two possible sources for the interest. The first is the PBS Newshour story Bernie Sanders’ long and winding road to backing Hillary Clinton above, The second is the mention of this tweet at Inquisitr:

@SilERabbit Jill is going to Burlington 4 a few days and to Philly w Nina Turner. I have a feeling something is in the air

I said in February and I’ll repeat it now: Nina Turner is a political force.

Jill Stein and Nina Turner in 2016?

Now that is a ticket I can very seriously get behind.

In Nothin’ But Blue Skies: The Heyday, Hard Times, and Hopes of America’s Industrial Heartland, Edward McClelland wrote in 2013:

[Cleveland’s Slavic Village] was more than 50 percent African-American. After the slumlords came the speculators, the house-flippers. Ohio had some of the weakest lending laws in the nation. Slavic Village, a neighborhood full of unwanted dwellings, was ground zero for exploitation.

Salon excepted McClelland’s book and expanded the metaphor in the headline for Cleveland: Ground zero for the housing bubble

Fast forward three years and Oliver Laughland and Mae Ryan reporting for The Guardian in ‘Donald Trump was part of the problem’: Cleveland’s subprime lesson for Republicans on the eve of the 2016 Republican National Convention write:

The House of Wills Funeral Home is slowly being reclaimed by undergrowth. Weeds climb up the walls, fanning out like veins, unkempt hedges soar skywards and tufts of grass sprout through cracks in the tarmac parking lot.

“No one from the RNC bothered coming here before they chose Cleveland, I’ll bet” says Xavier Allen 44, pointing to three bullet holes in the front window and a collapsed ceiling in the porch, where two red armchairs sit covered in rubble. “Donald Trump doesn’t care. He was part of the problem.”

The building, in the Mount Pleasant neighborhood on the city’s eastside, was abandoned in 2014 after the owners fled without announcement or explanation, amid allegations of fraud. They left behind urns of cremated remains, empty coffins and hundreds of personal client documents. The building was looted shortly after and has remained a hotspot of criminal activity.

But The House of Wills is just one of hundreds of blighted and abandoned properties in this neighbourhood, one of the hardest hit throughout the city’s foreclosure crisis that intensified during the 2008 housing market crash and savaged Cleveland’s poorest neighbourhoods as the city lost 17% of its population within a decade.

In Mount Pleasant, where more than 15% of the neighbourhood’s housing stock is currently vacant or abandoned, average property sale prices plunged from an average of $84,000 in 2005 to just $14,837 in 2015. Evictions soared. Slum landlords continue to prosper. Much of the occupied property is now effectively worthless.

But at the height of Mount Pleasant’s suffering, Trump sought to capitalise.

In 2008 the billionaire Republican advised “pupils” at his now defunct business education company, Trump University, they could make a million dollars within a year by targeting vulnerable communities with individuals desperate to offload their properties. “Investors Nationwide are Making Millions in Foreclosures … AND SO CAN YOU!” he claimed in targeted newspaper adverts that carried photos of Trump staring sternly at camera with a slight smirk.
Residents of the Mount Pleasant neighborhood in Cleveland, Ohio bike down a street littered with abandoned homes.

At this time the real estate mogul had only recently shuttered a brokerage company, Trump Mortgages, which had, according to insider accounts, offered subprime mortgages to customers through cold calls.

Trump is set to accept his party’s nomination for the US presidency three miles down the road from Mount Pleasant on Thursday. Some in Cleveland, America’s second poorest major city, are flabbergasted.

Republicans? Not really.

The Paris Review: “The Art Of Fiction No. 6” with Alberto Moravia:

MORAVIA: Yes. But I want it quite clearly understood: my works are not autobiographical in the usual meaning of the word. Perhaps I can put it this way: whatever is autobiographical is so in only a very indirect manner, in a very general way. I am related to Girolamo, but I am not Girolamo. I do not take, and have never taken, either action or characters directly from life. Events may suggest events to be used in a work later; similarly, persons may suggest future characters; but suggest is the word to remember. One writes about what one knows. For instance, I can’t say I know America, though I’ve visited there. I couldn’t write about it. Yes, one uses what one knows, but autobiography means something else. I should never be able to write a real autobiography; I always end by falsifying and fictionalizing—I’m a liar, in fact. That means I’m a novelist, after all. I write about what I know.

Found in my electronic chapbook…

I prefer coffee to tea, but the routine is more about the drumbeat of actions and less about the details.

Balanchine rose early, before 6:00 a.m., made a pot of tea, and read a little or played a hand of Russian solitaire while he gathered his thoughts. —George Balanchine (1904-1983) page 124.

From Daily Rituals: How Artists Work by Mason Curry.

Russian solitaire is a particularly brutal form of the game. One of my favorite writers, Lawrence Block, also use solitaire as a way to gather his thoughts.

Found in my electronic chapbook.

Found in James Campbell’s Ginsberg, Kerouac and Burroughs: celebrating the Beats in Paris.

The tile comes from a collaborative poem by the same title by Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady which begins:

Pull my daisy
tip my cup
all my doors are open
Cut my thoughts
for coconuts
all my eggs are broken
Jack my Arden
gate my shades
woe my road is spoken
Silk my garden
rose my days
now my prayers awaken

When the movers and shakers in Cleveland, my adopted hometown, celebrated the landing of the 2016 Republican National Convention which begins in three days they were not thinking about Chicago in 1968 when police rioted because fewer than 500 protesters were not happy with, among other issues, the way President Lyndon Johnson had handled the Vietnam War. The suits enjoying single malt, Cuban cigars and embarrassingly white high fives were thinking about whiter than white Jeb Bush. They were not prepared for the Orange Hulk Donald Trump.

Fifty years ago, to the day, Cleveland experienced one of the city’s darkest days: The Hough Rebellion. I sincerely hope that no one gets hurt here, but clearly this will not be the convention power brokers in Cleveland thought they were buying.

Alice Speri, writing in After Week of Violence, Cleveland Prepares for Chaos at Republican Convention for The Intercept, explains:

Cleveland, Ohio, has spent $50 million preparing for next week’s Republican convention, earning the city a lawsuit and much criticism in the process. But as the fraught relationship between police and black communities was thrust back into the national spotlight last week after police killings in Louisiana and Minnesota, the ensuing protests, and the sniper attack in Dallas, many fear the convention could descend into chaos.

Police officials, who for months have said they are confident they have the best possible security plans in place, said they were adjusting them following the Dallas attack, though they have declined to elaborate. “We have got to make some changes without a doubt,” Ed Tomba, the city’s deputy police chief and head of convention security, told Reuters. “We will have plenty of people watching over different locations. We are beefing up the intelligence component, too. They are going to be very, very active.”

Cleveland’s press office, which is handling all convention-related media requests, including to the police, did not respond to requests for comment…

Speri continues:

Police reassurances that they are ready for the convention have done little to appease activists and civil rights advocates who accused the city of being badly prepared for the influx of visitors and protesters, and who said surveillance tactics deployed in the weeks preceding the convention—including law enforcement showing up unannounced at local activists’ homes—have already crossed a line.

In the aftermath of the Dallas attack, police departments nationwide called for more military equipment and training, including robots capable of delivering lethal force such as the one used against the Dallas shooter. As images and videos emerged last week of protesters in Baton Rouge meeting a disproportionately equipped police force, demands for the demilitarization of police departments were renewed.

In Cleveland, officials are estimated to have spent at least $20 million in federal funds on equipment ranging from bicycles and steel barriers to 2,000 sets of riot gear, 2,000 retractable steel batons, body armor, surveillance equipment, 10,000 sets of plastic flex cuffs, and 16 laser aiming systems, which a technology retailer describes as being used for “night direct-fire aiming and illumination.” And while the city has not fully disclosed all the equipment it has acquired for the convention, Ohio’s chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, which has been monitoring the preparations, raised concerns that police might be planning to deploy Stingray devices, used to monitor and track cellphones, as well as a Long-Range Acoustic Device, a sonic crowd-control weapon that emits painfully loud sounds.

We should all pay close attention to the numbers, particularly the 2,000 sets of riot gear. I’m less concerned, as are others, about how that gear will used during the convention than I am with what the police will do after the convention. When you have 2,000 retractable steel batons, you have a natural inclination to not simply let them gather dust in some subbasement.

We should all be very concerned with the continued militarization of our police forces and what happens when military equipment is used on our own citizens.

Scott Roberts, a campaign director for Color of Change, a racial justice group that this week launched a campaign to defund abusive police departments, told Speri:

My biggest concern about what’s happening in Cleveland and the $50 million the federal government has given them for public safety is what happens afterwards. We’re concerned about Cleveland law enforcement being more heavily militarized in the future when there are protests, and cameras from around the world are not there. All the equipment just stays in place, and you end up with a whole different degree of militarized law enforcement and surveillance long after the convention leaves.

We should all be, as another Clevelander, Mano Singham is, watching.

Singham has volunteered to monitor events at the convention for the Ohio ACLU and, I hope, will be providing his always insightful observations over the course of the week.

The whole world is watching Cleveland and they’re not doing so because they expect unicorns and rainbows.

I’ve referenced this show a number of times, but I keep forgetting to post the entire video, so here you go. While you should watch the entire video, the bit I keep referencing begins at timemark 5:10 with Jonathan Miller’s description of our American two-party system.

An urban legend is told by baby boomers of being harshly instructed by their parents to clean your plates because there are starving children in India who would love to have that food. The smartass response, also an urban legend, is the kid who whips out a large manila envelope addressed to “The Starving Children Of India” and dumps their plate of food into the envelope.

We have no shortage of food in the United States. We grow twice as much food as we consume and we waste far, far more of our food than ever was scrapped into the collected garbage disposals of any America.

Suzanne Goldenberg, writing in From field to fork: the six stages of wasting food for The Guardian, explains:

Eery second, an amount of food equal to the weight of a sedan car is thrown away in the US – about 60m tonnes a year. It starts at the farm. The potato that grew to the size of a brick. The watermelon with the brown slasher marks on the rind. The cauliflower stained yellow in the sun. The peach that lost its blush before harvest. Any of those minor imperfections – none of which affect taste or quality or shelf life – can doom a crop right there. If the grower decides the supermarkets – or ultimately the consumer – will reject it, those fruits and vegetables never make it off the farm.

Then there are the packing warehouses, where a specific count must be maintained for each plastic clamshell or box – and any strawberry or plum that does not make it is junked, if it can’t immediately be sold for juice or jam.

Most of our food travels a long journey before it gets to our plate. From farm and pack house to wholesale distributor, cardboard cartons can take a tumble and dent, rendering the contents unsaleable. One traffic jam too many and pre-washed lettuce can wilt in the plastic bag.

Last—and maybe the most wasteful of all—are the supermarkets, restaurants and all of us, the ordinary consumers who faced with expanding portion sizes inevitably leave behind meals when we eat out and somehow always manage to forget those pots of flavored yoghurt in the back of the fridge.

At a school where I work we provide snacks for the students and one time last year we had a bowl of fruit that included bananas. One of the students was about to throw away a ripe banana when I stopped him and asked what he was doing. He told me: The banana’s rotten, Mr. Hess. We sat down and had a talk about the difference between ripe and rotten. While we talked I ate most of the banana, but I saved a bit that had some tannish, soft spots which I gave to the student after I had finished and said, Go ahead, you won’t die. What are you afraid of? He ate the bit that he had described as rotten but I told him was ripe.

He hesitated. Popped the banana in and prepared—I could see waiting reaction of disgust—to spit the mass into the nearest trash basket, but he didn’t. He chewed and swallowed and told me that the banana tasted better than what he was used to. That was because, I told him, he was used to eating green or underripe.

We are a nation too familiar with eating food that is picked long before ripening and delivered to our groceries and tables. Here in Ohio we have a brief strawberry season when people descend upon green grocers and roadside stands to buy pint after pint of the best strawberries you’ll ever eat. The season lasts for about two weeks in July. Strawberries have been available in the grocery store for months, however, and will continue to be available for months to come.

I wouldn’t waste a penny on those poor red chunks of Styrofoam so perfectly shaped and colored to entice, yet the store stock them, and I see lots of people buying them, and their families probably have no idea what a fresh strawberry tastes like.

Barbara Kingsolver wrote Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life about a family experiment where they only ate food that they grown/raised themselves or that had been raised/grown within a short distance of their home. I high recommend that anyone touched by Goldenberg’s writing to find a copy of Kingsolver’s book and see how we can begin to change the atrocity of wasting massive resources—water, energy, chemicals, fuel and time—growing food to be thrown away.

The discussion regarding the use of a drone on American soil to summarily execute a suspected criminal is gaining traction. Noel Sharkey, writing in Are we prepared for more killer police robots? for The Guardian, makes his case:

When a police robot is used to kill, one has to ask if we are at a tipping point. The dangerous events in Dallas, in which 12 policemen were shot, made it seem permissible to repurpose a robot to apply lethal force. When an armed suspect refused to surrender, a Remotec robot armed with plastic explosives was dispatched to kill him. This wasn’t Robocop and it didn’t operate autonomously. It was a bomb disposal robot remotely controlled by police officers.

There is justification for this kill and legal scholars have pronounced that it was probably legal. The Dallas police chief said: “Other options would have exposed our officers to great danger.” The Dallas mayor said it was “the right call” and he has no qualms about resorting to the same strategy in the future. “The key thing is to keep our police out of harm’s way.”

No Mayor Mike Rawlings, the key thing is to keep the good citizens of Dallas safe, and that includes keeping suspects safe from summary executions. Johnson, surrounded and isolated by police forces, represented no threat to anyone other than himself. Yet, we continue to be fed this fiction that somehow there was an urgency in killing Johnson.

What was the urgency Mayor Rawlings? Did Johnson represent a public media headache for you as long as he drew breath?

Consider that only 68.5 miles southeast of Dallas a white man, John Joe Gray, held police forces at bay for 14 years!

Deeper in the story, Sharkey moves to the broader issues:

Human rights advocates are already disquieted by the increasing trend to arm drone copters with so-called “less than lethal” weapons. Desert Storm, a South African company, makes a Skunk octocopter that comes equipped with pepper spray and a plastic ball gun designed to break miner’s strikes. Now, with growing international demand, they are sold only in 50-unit bundles with new factories opening in Oman and Brazil. The company does not reveal their customers.

It was a shock last year when North Dakota passed a bill allowing the police to arm their drones with Tasers and guns to fire rubber bullets—which can kill or maim. We worried that the new law was a step too far. Would police now use armed robots whenever they get nervous, perhaps against public protesters? It would be just too tempting for dispersing and attacking with impunity.

The answer to Sharkey’s question is yes. If we allow them.

We must not.

Previously:

I’m no sports fan, but today I have an inkling what coming so close time after time after time and then losing feels like. I finally get the feeling of mumbling “wait until next year” into your beer.

I’ll get right to the nut. I got a 1,422-word email from Bernie five hours ago. The email, like dozens I’ve read and responded to with both energy and nearly $1,000 I didn’t really have to give, begins with 630 words of blah, blah, blah, before getting to the only words that count.

Bernie wrote: I endorsed Hillary Clinton to be our next president.

There’s another 782 words of blah, blah, blah, but who gives a fuck?

I won’t be voting for Hillary Clinton. My time and energy now goes to Jill Stein, the Green Party’s candidate for President of the United States. If Trump does win, and today I think that is a very real possibility, then I won’t feel a second of blame. This is on the power brokers at the Democratic National Committee and their anointed one.

Fuck them all.

Meet John Joe Gray of Trinidad, Texas. Gray is what is called a Sovereign, a particularly nasty individual who takes “the position that they are answerable only to their particular interpretation of the common law and are not subject to any statutes or proceedings at the federal, state, or municipal levels.” I came across Gray, in, of all places, Chuck Shepherd’s News Of The Weird in my most recent copy of Funny Times which reported:

What is believed to be the longest-running armed standoff in U.S. history came to a quiet conclusion on Jan. 6 in Trinidad, Texas, when John Joe Gray outlasted the district attorney—never having left his 47-acre ranch in the past 15 years. In 1999, Gray, carrying a pistol but without a permit, resisted arrest and bit a state trooper, retreating to his property, refusing to leave for court. The sheriff, explaining why his deputies declined to go after him, once said, “Joe Gray has been in prison out there himself (for 14 years).” (Actually, the charges were dismissed in December 2014, but when the district attorney left office, he failed to notify Gray or the deputies.) [WFAA-TV (Dallas-Fort Worth, 1-8-2016]

Gray is, of course, of Northern European extraction.

Steve Campbell, reporting in Authorities ignore fugitive holed up on Texas land for 11 years for The Fort Worth Star Telegram wrote 2011:

Henderson County Sheriff Ray Nutt, who is the fourth lawman in the post since 2000, says, like his predecessors, that he’s not willing to risk a gunbattle just to arrest Gray.

“John Joe Gray is not worth it. Ten of him is not worth going up there and getting one of my young deputies killed,” he said

I’m sure that Sheriff Nutt didn’t have the budget of Dallas Police Chief David Brown, so I’d be very surprised if I learned that he had a drone like the one used to summarily execute Micah Xavier Johnson. Even if Nutt did have such a toy, however, I would be even more surprised to have learned that he used drone to extract Gray. If Gray were of other than Northern European heritage, however, I have no doubt there would have been no 14-year standoff.

Previously:

How many can you write the story about the hottest month, year, decade before your mind goes numb? When do we become the frog in the stewpot (not true, by the way, the frog always jumps out of the pot)?

There is a window, I think, of engagement. I may be too old, I’ll be dead before Global Warming gives us the world of Mad Max. Children may be too young, they haven’t yet developed the mental capacities to truly understand the enormity of what their elders are doing to the planet they must live out their lives in. We may be too affluent, our lifestyles are the ones that must change the most to save the planet and we are ill prepared to give up our toys and perqs, I write sitting in my air condition house.

So, who does that leave to do the work? Well, actually, all of us.

Dana Nuccitelli, reporting in We just broke the record for hottest year, nine straight times for The Guardian, writes:

2014 and 2015 each set the record for hottest calendar year since we began measuring surface temperatures over 150 years ago, and 2016 is almost certain to break the record once again. It will be without precedent: the first time that we’ve seen three consecutive record-breaking hot years.

But it’s just happenstance that the calendar year begins in January, and so it’s also informative to compare all yearlong periods. In doing so, it becomes clear that we’re living in astonishingly hot times.

June 2015 through May 2016 was the hottest 12-month period on record. That was also true of May 2015 through April 2016, and the 12 months ending in March 2016. In fact, it’s true for every 12 months going all the way back to the period ending in September 2015, according to global surface temperature data compiled by Kevin Cowtan and Robert Way. We just set the record for hottest year in each of the past 9 months.

Here in the United States, only Bernie Sanders did his best to have a real discussion about Climate Change/Global Warming; Trump wants us to believe that he thinks its a hoax (I have no idea what he actually thinks) and Clinton, well, Clinton says what ever her handlers tell her polls the best in the moment. All the bullshit about party platforms is just that. No party platform has ever lasted a nanosecond past the closing gavel of a convention.

What bothers me the most is that my own awareness of Global Warming goes back nearly 50 years. Climate change is not a threat that popped up like ISIS. We’ve known what we were doing for most of my life, but I’ve been worried about other concerns. I, like 99.999 percent of other humans, have lived in the glass house hoarding stones.

There are times when warming up your pitching arm is the right action.

Keep Carbon In The Ground…

Just another average boring day in America…

Via Mano Singham.

Last evening I was able to spend a few precious hours with a shipmate who I hadn’t seen for some 30 years. Our conversation turned to my writing and the struggles I have telling the story I want to tell. I did my best to describe the mental state of writers as I understand the condition and how the threads of depression, mania, drug addiction, alcoholism run through the lives of so many writers. Samuel Beckett coped with his beast by embracing it.

Beckett’s entire life revolved around his almost psychotic obsession to write.

The siege, a period of intense creative activity beginning in 1946, began with an epiphany. On a late-night walk near Dublin harbor, Beckett found himself standing on the end of a pier in the midst of a winter storm. Amid the howling wind and churning water, he suddenly realized that the “dark he had struggled to keep under” in his life—and in his writing, which had until then failed to find an audience or meet his own aspirations—should, in fact, be the source of his creative inspiration. “I shall always be depressed,” Beckett concluded, “but what comforts me is the realization that I can now accept this dark side as the commanding side of my personality. In accepting it, I will make it work.” —Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) page 91.

From Daily Rituals: How Artists Work by Mason Curry.

I can’t begin to imagine what an incredibly brave act was entailed in that acceptance.

Found in my electronic chapbook.

Nina Turner emails:

As a former state senator in Ohio—and someone who campaigned hard all over the country for a real economic populist, Senator Bernie Sanders—I won’t be silent as Donald Trump comes to our doorstep to be officially named the Republican presidential nominee after the Republican National Convention comes to Cleveland one week from today.

I am concerned about an environment of hate polluting the championship environment that is permeating my great city. I cannot sit back to watch Ohio get overrun by the hate-mongering Republican Party when their convention comes to Cleveland next week.

That’s why this coming Saturday, July 16, just days before the Republican National Convention meets, I’ll be joining MoveOn members and other Ohioans from across the state to talk with our neighbors at their doorsteps about our shared and unified vision for the future.

Our people’s hopes and dreams are beautifully diverse, but the one thing we all know is this: we rebuke the dark and cynical vision Donald Trump has peddled throughout his campaign and that we can expect him to peddle in Ohio during his convention. And we’ll do so with dignity, pride, and vision by engaging our communities Continue Reading »